The present invention generally relates to methodologies for displaying search results.
When searching a large domain of information such as a medical patient database, often a user is searching for a particular patient. This represents a different scenario than a web search, where a user is often not searching for a particular web page.
For example, in a traditional search flow in the health care space, a user might initiate a patient search by inputting a name, a birthdate, or a patient identifier. In response, a system might display search results comprising a list of patients. FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary display of such search results in response to a user, looking to search for “Sally Smith”, inputting a search string of “Smith, Sa”. Sometimes, displayed search results will include display of additional information about each patient, but will generally not show all patient information for each patient in order to keep the result list readable by the user.
If the user enters a first and last name, and the search domain is very large, then a large number of search results could be returned with many appearing very similar to one another in terms of the displayed information. For example, if the user is looking for Sally Smith, and the system contains 34 Sally Smiths, then many of those search results could be visually very similar and the user may not see enough distinguishing information across the search results in order to pick out the Sally Smith that they are interested in, as illustrated in FIG. 1. A need exists for improvement in methodologies for displaying search results. This need and other needs are addressed by one or more aspects of the present invention.